Other strategies for promotion management?

Having read this blog post on object migration, I am wondering if there are any alternative strategies?

It is somewhat tedious to have to go through so many steps to move changes from development to production with Designer. You have to do the following if you make a change (or bugfix on production process):

Make change on local dev repo

Check into devcentral

Reopen designer, connect to local test repo

Pull to local test repo

Check into testcentral

Reopen designer, connect to local production repo

Pull to local prod repo (now live)

Check into production central

I understand you can bypass the checkin steps (2,5,8) and directly move objects from local repo to other local repo, but this bypasses all the standard version control. Is there any way to prevent this (and require objects to go through the central repository check-in process)?